This is the website/blog of Philosopher Stephen Law. Stephen is Provost of Centre for Inquiry UK, Senior Lecturer in philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, and editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK. He has published several books (see sidebar). His other blog is THE OUTER LIMITS: http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/blibnblob
For school talks and media email Stephen: think-at-royalinstitutephilosophy.org

Saturday, January 19, 2013

My talk today on New Teleological Arguments (for A Level)

Here is the text taken from my powerpoint that accompanied my talk
today at Heythrop College. If you are a pupil or teacher interested in attending other A
Level philosophy and/or RS conferences, go here (I speak at most of them).

nNew Teleological Arguments

nStephen Law

nWhat are we going to do?

nHave a short reminder of Paley’s design argument - plus problems.

nMove on to two more recent versions
of the argument from design…

n1. Fine-tuning arguments
(plus criticisms)

n2. ID/irreducible complexity
arguments (plus criticisms)

nPART 1: Paley’s argument

nPaley’s watch/eye analogy.

nStandard criticisms of Paley’s argument:

nNatural selection provides a
naturalistic explanation for the purpose and complexity of the eye, that avoids
the need to invoke the supernatural.

nPaley’s argument fails to provide any more support
for the hypothesis that the designer is the Christian God than it does for the
hypothesis that it is some other sort of being, e.g. an evil God.

nPART 2: The fine-tuning argument

nIf the basic laws and initial
conditions of the universe had been only slightly different, galaxies, stars,
planets and intelligent life would not have emerged…

nThe fine-tuning argument

n…The
probability of the universe having just these starting conditions by chance is
ridiculously slim. It’s much more likely that some intelligence deliberately
fine-tuned the universe to have us in it. That intelligence is God.

nThe fine-tuning argument

nThe
fine-tuning argument is not so new. F.R. Tennant presented a version of
it in the 20s:

n“For
the point is that, for the existence of any forms of life that we may conceive,
the necessary environment, whatever its nature, must be complex and dependent
on a multiplicity of coincident conditions, such as are not reasonably
attributable to blind forces or pure mechanism.”

nProblems with fine-tuning: lottery
fallacy?

nSuppose
you buy one of one million lottery tickets. You win. This was incredibly
unlikely, of course. But does your win require some sort of purposive
explanation? Is it reasonable to suppose some intelligence deliberately
rigged the lottery in your favour?

nLottery fallacy

nNo.
For whoever won would have been just as unlikely to win. A mammoth coincidence
was inevitable. Similarly with the universe: whichever way the universe
had been set up would have been no less unlikely. So the fact that it happened
to be set up this way, to produce us, does not require any sort of
explanation.

nFiring squad reply

nIn reply, it’s sometimes claimed that as
there’s only one universe, not countless universes, the chances of the
actual universe being one in which the laws and initial conditions are
perfectly tuned for life is a coincidence that cannot be explained on
the grounds that “a coincidence was inevitable”.

nFiring squad reply (cont.)

nSuppose
a firing squad fires fifty bullets at you all of which miss. It’s reasonable
for you to conclude this was deliberately rigged.

nIn
the case of a single execution, it’s more plausible that someone deliberately
arranged to save your life.

nSimilarly, as there’s only one universe, the
coincidence that it should be set up just so, to produce life, is too
much to swallow.

nThe multiverse

nIn
response to the firing squad reply it’s been suggested by Astronomer Royal
Martin Rees that there are countless universes each with its own laws
and initial conditions. Every permutation is realized. So the
fine-tuning argument does commit the lottery fallacy.

nBut
is there a multiverse?

nThe
other main problem with intelligent design is that identity of the designer
need bear no relation at all to the God of traditional monotheism. The “designing agency” can be a
committee of gods, for example. The designer can be a natural being or beings,
such as an evolved super-mind or super-civilization existing in a previous
universe, or in another section of our universe, which made our universe using
super-technology. The designer can also be some sort of superdupercomputer
simulating this universe. So invoking a super-intellect is fraught with problems.
Paul Davies.

nPART 3: ID and irreducible
complexity

nMichael
Behe “Darwin’s Black Box”

nWhat
is irreducible complexity?

n"By irreducibly complex I
mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that
contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts
causes the system to effectively stop functioning."

nBehe’s mousetrap

nBehe’s
favourite example is the mousetrap. Take any part away - the spring, the board,
etc. - and the whole thing fails to function.

nBacterial Flagellum

nThere
are irreducibly complex systems in nature. A commonly cited example of naturally
occurring irreducible complexity is the bacterial flagellum – a sort of rotor
drive that bacteria use to propel themselves.

nThe problem for Darwin

nAccording
to Behe, the problem for evolution/natural selection is that an irreducibly
complex system cannot evolve gradually via Darwinian natural selection.
There is no survival/reproductive advantage in having half or a quarter of a
bacterial flagellum. It’s all or nothing.

nBehe’s conclusion

nSo
if the bacterial flagellum did evolve naturally, it would have to evolve in
just one generation.

nThat’s
ridiculously unlikely. More likely that some intelligence designed it that way.

nProblems with Behe’s argument: Orr

nThe
existence of an irreducibly complex system is actually entirely compatible
with gradual Darwinian natural selection. A part may be added to a system
that improves it, without being essential to it. But then the system itself may
change making the inessential part essential.

nOrr’s
example: lungs.

nProblems with Behe’s argument: Miller

n[Behe]
writes that in the absence of “almost any” of its parts, the bacterial flagellum “does not work”. But guess
what? A small group of proteins from the flagellum does work without the rest
of the machine — it’s used by many bacteria as a device for injecting poisons
into other cells. Although the function performed by this small part when
working alone is different, it nonetheless can be favored by natural selection.
Kenneth R. Miller.

nSo
there are at least two ways natural selection can evolve irreducibly complex
systems.

nKenneth R. Miller

nIn
the final analysis, the biochemical hypothesis of intelligent design fails not
because the scientific community is closed to it but rather for the most basic
of reasons — because it is overwhelmingly contradicted by the scientific
evidence. Kenneth R. Miller.

nThe
dishonesty of [intelligent design] lies in its proponents pointing to a
controversy when there really is no controversy. A friend of mine did an
informal survey of more than ten million articles in major science journals
during the past twelve years…. Searching for “Intelligent Design” yielded
eighty-eight articles. All but eleven of those were in engineering journals...
Of the eleven articles, eight were critical of the scientific basis for
Intelligent Design theory and the remaining three turned out to be articles in
conference proceedings, not peer-reviewed research journals. So that’s the
extent of the "controversy" in the scientific literature. There is
none. Lawrence Krauss.

nFurther problem: does intelligent
fine-tuner, ID hypothesis even make sense?

nIsn’t the suggestion that there might be a
non-temporal agent/designer as nonsensical as the suggestion that there might
be a non-spatial mountain?

nFurther problem

nThere is a further problem for ID
args for God. Just like the fine-tuning argument, Behe’s argument doesn’t establish anything about the character
of this intelligent designer.

nIn fact, doesn’t the empirical evidence strongly
suggest the designer is not all-powerful and all-good….

nIf we can rule out an evil God on
the basis of observation of the world around us (too much good stuff), why
can’t we rule out an evil god?

16 comments:

The best response to Paley's argument, that I've read, came from John D. Barrow (in one of his many books): A watch only serves a purpose when it's finished. An uncompleted watch is useless. Every generation in evolution is its own end-result - there are no uncompleted species. That's the difference.

It's chaos (mathematically) that drives evolution - evolution, like much of nature, is fractal. Chaotic phenomena, though deterministic, are completely unpredictable. This means, as Stephen Jay Gould once pointed out, that if you were to re-run evolution, you'd get a completely different result. The same applies to the universe itself.

If you have infinite time and space, then anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times, so there would be an infinite number of you and me. This also applies to an infinite multiverse, whether in time or space. But you don't need an infinite amount of time and space to produce just one isolated habitat for complex life, just a lot of both, which, as Barrow points out, is why the universe has to be so big and old to produce intelligent life.

I think the universe is purpose-built for life but that doesn't make it teleological. The universe is creative - that's its nature - but its purpose has evolved just like everything else.

There is an aspect of biology that is teleological and that is the construction of every single organism – they all follow a blueprint that is coded in their DNA. The origin of DNA, effectively a 4 letter software code, is the most difficult element to explain in evolutionary biology.

Another point, that few people raise, is the extraordinary specialness of the Big Bang in regard to entropy. Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality makes the point via a ‘fanciful decription’:

Creation of the universe: a fanciful description! The Creator's pin had to find a tiny box, just 1 part in 10exp10exp123 of the entire phase-space volume, in order to create a universe with as special a Big Bang as that we actually find.

I can’t use exponentials in this format but 10 raised to 10 raised to 123; an extraordinary number. This is to get the entropy small enough to allow the entropy loss predicted for the entire universe, which is a major driver of the entire evolution of the universe in its lifetime.

A minor quibble in response to Paul Mealing's interesting points: DNA is a lot of amazing things, but one thing it is absolutely not is a blueprint for anything. The metaphor is misleading, since it implies a one-to-one mapping from the plan to the finished product, which is precisely what doesn't happen in development. Even before epigenetics took off and provided insight into the mechanism of environmental influences, it was clear than a single genotype could give rise to multiple phenotypes.

One thing about the watch as an example of a designed object is that it, itself, has evolved. From very simple beginnings like water bowls with holes, candles with markings, through mechanical mechanisms up to the vibration of atoms of caesium.

Actually, I think a better metaphor for DNA is software, because it contains the 'instructions' to build an organism in all its functionality.

I think it's teleological to the extent that the organism's development follows a plan that is encoded in its DNA.

To quote Davies from The Cosmic Blueprint (pp. 102-3):

In studying the development of the embryo it is hard to resist the impression that there exists somewhere a blueprint, or plan of assembly, carrying instructions needed to achieve the finished form. In some as yet poorly understood way, the growth of the organism is tightly constrained to conform to this plan. There is a strong element of teleology involved.

Now, I'm not saying there is a 'plan' per se, but the DNA is a code with 'instructions' that works very similarly to a Turing machine.

Interestingly, Erwin Schrodinger predicted such a code in his Dublin lectures on What is Life? (1944), only he made the analogy with Morse code.

The evolution you refer to has occurred in the human mind as we come up with better ways to achieve the same result. Technological evolution is a special case, even a byproduct, of cultural evolution, which is a human specialty.

The fine-tuning argument claims that the Christian God had to choose all kinds of suitable parameters to allow life to exist.

But could God have failed to find suitable parameters?

Could the only possible setting of gravitational strength which worked have clashed with the only possible setting of electric field strength which worked?

Either these parameters could have clashed, or they could not have clashed.

If they could have clashed, so that NO possible combination of fundamental constants would have worked, then God is just as lucky as the rest of us that there happened to be some suitable combination which did, in fact, work.

But if the fundamental constants of nature could not even in theory have clashed, so that no matter what narrow range gravity had to have, there would always be a narrow range of electrical field strength which worked...

Well, how could that be?

Isn't that just as much a mystery as fine-tuning itself?

How could it be impossible even in theory for there to be no clashes between parameters, when fine-tuning proponents insist themselves that there is only an incredibly tiny window of opportunity?

How can there be an a priori guarantee that there will be an open window, when the essence of the fine-tuning argument is that it could so easily have been shut?

The interesting thing about metaphors is discriminating between their strengths and weaknesses. Software, for example, can be deleted from hardware in a way that DNA cannot be deleted from a human body.

A better metaphor for the mixing of genetic and environmental influences is the recipe for baking a cake: there are ingredients and instructions but the final product cannot be reverse engineered.

The problem with words like "plan" and "instructions" and "design" is that they often imply "planner" and "instructor" and "designer". Always worth remembering that natural selection does not look ahead at all.

I’m not an advocate of ID in case I’m being misconstrued, and I’m not arguing about natural selection. Evolution is not teleological but the development of every individual organism is. With the exception of the last paragraph of my first comment, I’m merely stating some scientifically deduced facts, and how people incorporate them into their philosophical world view is up to them.

I’m not the only person who has compared DNA to software. Gregory Chaitin, in Thinking about Godel and Turing, makes the point that, with its 4 bases, human DNA contains 6 trillion bits of information. As Davies points out in The Cosmic Blueprint it’s theoretically possible for software to make physical changes to its hardware (he calls it ‘downward causation’) and, basically, that’s exactly what DNA does very efficiently.

I think 'instruction' in this context is more than a metaphor because genes express instructions in exactly the same way software does. Remember that software has no 'mind', even of the artificial kind.

Thanks for the reference to Gregory Chaitin (pity the paperback is over £50 on Amazon!). Coincidentally, I was just following up a reference to his Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of Reason, which follows John Barrow's Impossibility in Stuart Firestein's excellent Ignorance.

I'm not sure about DNA and downward causation. Surely, DNA just codes for proteins?

Of course, at the level of electronic orbits, software must affect physical hardware – information is a physical quantity, after all.

Yes, 'downward causation' is probably not appropriate for DNA. I think the mind is a better example, following Hofstadter's notion of a 'strange loop'. But I wouldn't call information a 'physical quantity'.

Davies was specifically talking about software making physical changes to hardware on a macro scale - he even drew a diagram to represent what he meant. He also used the term in conjunction with quantum mechanics, saying that John Wheeler (his mentor, apparently) claimed that 'downward causation' in QM was 'backwards in time', but that's muddying the waters a bit.

I've read a lot of Barrow's books and most of Davies' but only one of Chaitin's, which I've started re-reading prompted by this discussion.